There's an interesting set of posts from PHP community members Adam Culp and Cal Evans each on a similar subject centering around conferences and the presentations made at them. They both wonder if talks are getting too "soft" and not focusing as much on the technology and getting in-depth as they should be. From Cal:

PHP conferences are changing very slowly, and not in a way that I like. I blame myself. As a frequent speaker I am getting lazy. I get caught up in the excitement of the CfP, I write up 5-10 abstracts and shotgun them into the CfP system hoping that something hits the mark. I've not actually written these talks. In most cases, I'm pretty sure I can get 45 minutes on the topic, but I don't know for sure because I've not bothered to write it yet. Adam Culp talks about this very thing in his post "Are Conference Talks Getting Too Soft?".

Adam points out that, while introductory talks and overviews are acceptable level coverage for someone new to the speaking scene (or development), the trend seems to be that everyone is providing less "meat" in their talks.

It is hard to teach a great amount in a 1 hour talk, but if there is not some immediately usable content an attendee will have a tough time proving to their short sighted boss that it was worth their time.

Both Adam and Cal set out a challenge, both to themselves and other speakers in the community. They encourage you to spend more time with your subjects, get in-depth into the topics, present on what you're excited about and maybe even try them out locally first.

Last time we finished up our look at Laravel 4.2's autoloader implementation. Like a lot of features in Laravel, (or any framework), once you pull out the microscope sharp edges begin to jut out everywhere. However, unlike many other framework teams, the Laravel core team is willing to make shifts in their platform and application architecture. If you're familiar with the internals of Laravel 4, looking at the internals of Laravel 3 may be a little disorienting. Similarly, the recent release of Laravel 5 presents some new wrinkles at the system level.

In the post he compares some of the differences based off of things found in a previous look at Laravel 4.2's autoloading system. He lists out the autoloaders initialized during the autoloader phase, four of them, including the use of the PhpParser library and Composer-only autoloading. He also includes a section at the end about some other smaller autoloading changes in the Composer configuration in both the "autoload" and "autoload-dev" sections.

PHP is one unique language where the array data type has been highly generalized to suit a very broad set of use cases. [...] I'm going to share with you some of the underlying details of how the PHP array data type works, why it works the way that it does, how it's different from other languages, and what behaviors the PHP array has that you may not be fully aware of.

He starts with a section looking at what arrays actually are in PHP (and how they compare to the lower level C arrays). He gives a C-based array example and shows how it's stored in memory. He points out how PHP arrays are different from other languages and shows the C code that works behind the scenes to create the array (actually a hashtable). He gets into a detailed explanation of the iteration of arrays including some basic benchmarks of some of the various methods and gets more in-depth with foreach (including subarrays and arrays containing references).